News Release

Equal Pay Day Today

April 17, 2012

Tuesday, April 17 is Equal Pay Day, a day to mark the fact that women still only earn 77 percent of each dollar earned annually by men and 82 percent of each dollar earned weekly. Equal Pay Day represents the date in the current year through which women must work to match what men earned in the previous year.

The group’s research “finds that women have lower median earnings than men in all but one of the 20 most common occupations for women, ‘bookkeeping and auditing clerks,’ where women and men have the same median earnings. In one of the twenty most common male occupations, ‘stock clerks and order fillers,’ women out-earned men by 3 percent of median male earnings.

Hegewisch said today: “These gender wage gaps are not about women choosing to work less than men — the analysis is comparing apples to apples, men and women who all work full time — and we see that across these 40 common occupations, men nearly always earn more than women. Discrimination law cases provide us with some insights on the reasons that the wage gap persists: women are less likely to be hired into the most lucrative jobs, and — when they work side by side with men — they may get hired at a lower rate, and receive lower pay increases over the years. Discrimination in who gets hired for the best jobs hits all women but particularly black and Hispanic women.” See the news release “Men Earn More Than Women Within Nearly All the Most Common Occupations.”

Also see the group’s “Pay Equity and Discrimination” resource page, which states: “Women are almost half of the workforce. They are the equal, if not main, breadwinner in four out of ten families. They receive more college and graduate degrees than men. Yet, on average, women continue to earn considerably less than men.”